The document provides an excellent overview of the most important standards from the vast Web services landscape, and explains how they can be used in practice to solve real-world problems. Topics addressed include useful combinations of standards, interoperability and platform support, and expectations for future developments.

Very nice article. One remark: WS-ReliableMessaging provides reliability on top of HTTP. But unfortunately, the spec says nothing about durability. Almost no WS-RM implementation persists messages to disk and re-delivers message in case of e.g. a system restart. Therefore, WS-RM is not a replacement for JMS (yet). Nor for all the other protocols used on the Internet to communicate reliably between business partners such as EDIINT/AS2, (S)FTP(S), RosettaNet, ...

PS: really enjoyed your talk at Javapolis '06, which is now available on www.parleys.com

It would be a better idea to show which products/projects have participated in the various interoperability workshops. For example, just because project XYZ says it "supports" WS-A Candidate Recommendation Foo doesn't mean it's actually interoperable with the implementation from company ABC. People mis-read specifications. Some specifications have optional features that may affect interoperability. That's the reason we have these various interoperability events.

It would be a better idea to show which products/projects have participated in the various interoperability workshops. For example, just because project XYZ says it "supports" WS-A Candidate Recommendation Foo doesn't mean it's actually interoperable with the implementation from company ABC. People mis-read specifications. Some specifications have optional features that may affect interoperability. That's the reason we have these various interoperability events.

100% agreed that just because there is a checkbox, doesn't mean the framework is fully interoperable. Adding a section on interop workshops might be an interesting way to show this, but that may border on too much detail for people. Maybe the matrices should include an asterisk saying that a specific project/product did not participate or did not pass interop with flying colors?

It'd help if more specs had test-suites as well. WS-A 1.0 does this, so you can have some idea about basic support (although I'm not sure how much). Test suites might be more meaningful in the WS-SX area where the scenarios are much more involved and you aren't sure how much of the spec each framework supports. I don't think that those frameworks that claim to implement Trust/SecureConversation handle every possible feature/use case.

Another thought is to turn this documentation into a wiki. In addition to making the content much more web friendly, it might let people comment on specific interoperability issues that people run into.